


In the Space Between

by thesearchforbluejello



Series: Rogue Oneshots [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Bedsharing, F/M, Hoth is colder than the Sub-Canadian Hellscape I live in, Rebelcaptain Week, a bit at least, and that frightens me, assume everyone's alive because that's how I'm rollin' this week, because I wasn't going to participate in this event without that trope, like at all, these two idiots can't handle feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 15:13:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15246081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/pseuds/thesearchforbluejello
Summary: In which Jyn and Cassian are bad at emotions, Hoth is cold, and Chirrut is a troublemaker.





	In the Space Between

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to SerenLyall for giving this a read-through for me! Today's prompt was "yearn."

By the second hour of snoring, Jyn is ready to slip a vibroblade between his ribs just to make it stop. She's freezing in her bunk, the cold of Hoth seeping through the poorly heated infrastructure of Echo Base, creeping between the fibers of her blankets to curl around her. Her bruised hip aches fiercely in the cold.

Her bunkmate snores again-- which one it is, she's not even sure-- and she bites back the urge to shout. She tears her blanket off her bunk and rolls to the edge as best she can without jostling her hip. 

The hallways are even colder than the barracks, somehow, and the muscles and ligaments of her hip ache as she strains against the stiffness, limping through the deserted halls. It's quiet on base these days, off duty hours being used to catch up on weeks of limited rest more than to pursue the kind of belligerent activities she's noticed the rebels are just as fond of as the Partisians. When your life could end at any moment, she knows, there's not much of a point denying yourself anything. She pulls her blanket back around herself a little harder than necessary, biting down that line of reasoning before it can go any further down a road she'd prefer to ignore.

The hallway is empty when she jabs in the command code to open the door. She doesn't turn on the lights; she toes off her boots, leaving them haphazardly on the floor in a way she knows he'd hate, and drops herself into the bed at an awkward angle to protect her hip. She burrows into his blankets with her own still wrapped tight around her, pulling them up to her nose and breathing him in. 

It's been months of near-misses and brief, awkward reunions, an oscillating exchange of spaces and places that she assumes has been carefully orchestrated. The universe is hardly so well ordered. 

He told her she could use his quarters when she was on base, so long as no one knew, but she's avoided them all the same. Being in them is to approach some intangible thing that she doesn't want anything to do with short of beating it with a stick until it goes away. 

If she falls asleep easier here, she tells herself it's because she's warmer.

***

When Bodhi tells him that she's off-world, Cassian thinks he should be relieved. Things have been nothing short of painfully awkward, for all of them, for awhile, and a deep part of him just wants to avoid it all until he's at least had the chance to sleep for the first time in days.

But there's a pressure, growing in his chest, that whispers to him that really he's not relieved at all.

He barely remembers the walk to his quarters when he gets there, absently keying in the code. He sits stiffly on the edge of the mattress to unlace his boots. He leans down to set them neatly by the foot of the bed, ready to go should the base go on alert, and in doing so rests his hand on a neatly folded blanket. He wonders for a moment if he's just too tired to remember having left it there. 

He casts a look behind him at the neatly made bed. It looks like how he'd left it. But he knows the blanket isn't his. 

He wraps himself up in it before pulling his own over him, breathing her in. 

He's been telling himself that he doesn't miss her. After all, it's hard to miss something that was never really in his life to begin with. But somehow, in some way he can't quite figure out, she's left an impression on him like sunspots in his vision that he can't blink away. It's dazzling and probably dangerous, but he's not strong enough to want to save himself from it.

He falls asleep thinking of her, wherever she is, star-bright.

***

Cassian scrambles for his blaster when he hears the door release. He's on his feet before he can see her silhouette framed against the dim light of the hallway. 

A myriad of jumbled curses stumble off her lips. "It's me," she says, somewhere in there. 

He lowers the blaster, belatedly, because he already knew that, but was too surprised that she was here at all for his mind to react properly.

"Fucking nerf-herder," she says.

"What?"

"Chirrut told me you weren't here."

"We got back ahead of schedule."

"Like he didn't know that," she snaps, the syllables caustic. Cassian just smiles, because of course Chirrut would have known. There's a silence that stretches out between them, thinning and straining as it pulls itself apart until it fractures. He holds his blaster by his side; she clutches her blanket around her. "Sorry," she finally says, turning to leave.

"No," he says, and she turns over her shoulder with an expression he can't quite read. "You could stay. If you want. It's warmer here. Than in the barracks."

For a moment he thinks she's going to leave with nothing behind her but those damn sunspots. But she says, "Okay."

She closes the door behind her and moves to lay herself, blanket and all, on the floor beside his bed. "I'll take the floor," he says quickly.

Jyn raises an eyebrow. "I can see the way you're walking. You won't even be able to get off the floor tomorrow if you sleep down here. And it's your bed anyway." He runs a hand through his hair. She's right-- his back is killing him. The mission had been pretty straight forward, but he'd ended up crouched in a confined space for a few hours, hiding from port officials, and it had strained all of the recently repaired bone and muscle that the medbay had spent so long working on.

"We'd both fit." The words are out in the space between them before he can hold them back. "I mean... It would just be... warmer." He shuts his mouth before it can betray him again.

Jyn just looks at him. He expects her to raise her chin and snap something at him like she does when she's uncomfortable. Instead, she looks at him a little too long, a little too intensely. He doesn't know what to say. Her hair is loose, down around her shoulders. It looks soft and he wants to touch it, but she's still looking at him, star-bright, and he doesn't know what to do.

"Okay," she says, and the word is soft.

"Okay." He says it more calmly than he expected.

Cassian was right--barely; the mattress is almost too small, but they both fit. His back is almost against the wall and she's almost on the edge. She tosses her blanket over both of them before Cassian pulls the rest up around them. She pulls the pillow at an angle so they can share, her head fitting just below his chin. She's facing him, arms tucked against herself in the narrow gap between them, her knuckles just resting against his chest. He runs a lock of her hair between his fingers, resting his wrist on her shoulder.

They fall asleep breathing each other in, and if they wake in the morning with no space between them at all, then, well, so be it.

**Author's Note:**

> Today's song selections are, drum-roll please: Conquest of Spaces by Woodkid and Hungry by Dotan.


End file.
